I got curious about it today and I’ll be darned if I can find a thing on Google. The only hit I get is someone asking the same question. I’ve phrased it every way I can think of. What I mostly get is accounts of fighting Germans.
Wouldn’t you think the Germans themselves would have some sort of info out there? After all, the Web is supposed to be worldwide, not just Allied!
Anyone have any suggestions? Unfortunately I only speak English so it would have to be readable for me.
Being half English, three-eights German and an eighth Irish, it kind of got to me. Why the one-sidedness?
I would say your best best is one of the Great War Living History/Battle Reenactment Societies - my brother is involved in a WW2 one in the UK and the better ones would have links with veteran organisations. There appear to be a couple dedicated to the German Army based in the USA.
However, this was in 1998. It might be possible that there are no German vets left. The last French veteran, Raymond Abescat, died in 2001 at the age of 109.
I tried finding something at the Reichsbund’s website but alas, I couldn’t find anything. (Maybe someone who actually can read German might have better luck, though.)
Most likely - there are more than 3.000 Germans who are at least a hundred years old. Most of these are women, of course, but there ought to be some male Germans of more than 104 years - some old articles on the demise of the up-to-that-time-oldest German that I found gave ages in the neighbourhood of 110 years.
I remember seeing a TV program about Tanzania four years ago or so; it had a short section about the last surviving Askari (African soldier in the German colonial army). I suspect that he enlisted at a younger age than Europeans did, though…
I could not find any cites for living WWI veterans on the Web, though. There is no remembrance day specific to World War I in Germany, where WWI veterans could possibly play a role. The sixth Sunday before Christmas is remembrance day for the dead of all wars. Also there are no specific benefit programs for war veterans (as is the case e.g. in the US) - the only reason that I know of that a public administration should track war veterans are disability pensions, and obviously veterans drawing a disability pension tend to have lower than average life expectancy, so there are probably none left.
BTW I could not find anything on the Reichsbund site either. The Reichsbund (nowadays Sozialverband) began as an organization of war veterans/wounded/widows/orphans in 1917 but has since morphed into a general social charity cum advocacy organization that has little to do with veterans.
I recall seeing somewhere (ie: no cite) that the Department of Defense figures for actuarial purposes that by 85 years after a particular war, all the veterans of that conflict will have died. 28 or 33 survivors is, relatively speaking, pretty close to zero, so that calculation is probably pretty accurate.
If I remember my history correctly, over 2.5 million Germans died in WWI. If one assumes that the youngest and fittest were sent into combat, and likely to their deaths, first, then the average age of those veterans who survived the conflict would have been fairly high (probably in the 30s). A person who was 35 in 1918 would be 121 today. So to me, it doesn’t seem unlikely that there are no living German WWI veterans.
Disclaimer: I am speaking OTOMH; if any of my assertions or assumptions are incorrect, please let me know.
By 1918 average age for the German Army was about 20. The Class of 1902 (sixteen-year-olds) was called up that summer (some 30.000 made it to the front before the collapse), and some fifteen-year olds have been reported.
30 would have been positively ancient in the infantry, even in 1914, except for a few NCOs and officers. By 1918 it would have been exceeding rare. Only about 10% of the German soldiers who were in the army in 1914 survived to 1918, and less than half of them were unwounded.
In fact, it’s remarkable thay any of them are still around.
As of May last year there was at least 1 german veteran, the oldest man in Germany - a veteran who was wounded in WWI & is apparently quite the character:
Adding somewhat to the death toll is the fact that Germany lost 2 world wars, and at the end of the 2nd, a lot of WWI vets got drafted into the Volksturm and died premature deaths.